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Telcon: 2016 03 10

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Massimiliano Culpo edited this page Mar 11, 2016 · 23 revisions

Participants

  1. Ben Boeckel (Kitware)
  2. Brandon Cook (NERSC)
  3. Chris Fuson (OLCF)
  4. D'jay Deo (Kitware)
  5. Greg Becker (LLNL)
  6. Greg Lee (LLNL)
  7. James Amundsen (Fermilab)
  8. Jake Wynne (OLCF)
  9. Jim Galarowicz (Krell)
  10. Joaquin Correa (NERSC)
  11. Mario Melara (NERSC)
  12. Matt Legendre (LLNL)
  13. Patrick Gartung (Fermilab)
  14. Ray Loy (ALCF)
  15. Peter Scheibel (LLNL)
  16. Robert French (OLCF)
  17. Todd Gamblin (LLNL)
  18. William Scullin (ALCF)

Status updates

  1. External packages (PR #120) finally merged. (Matt Legendre) * Needs to get exercised a lot before we cut a release -- have at it!
    • Still working on an issue with specifying providers * Docs are here (probably need to make concretization policies more prominent):
    • Concretization policies
    • External packages * Group agreed that the nobuild: True preference should be switched to build: False
  2. Cray & new platforms support merge (Greg Becker)
  3. Issues with Intel compilers fixed in #451 (Massimilliano Culpo, Adam Stewart, Luigi Calori)
    • Fixed a number of quoting/version check issues with icc in Spack's compiler wrapper
  4. Build dependencies #378 (Ben Boeckel)
    • Once this is in, we can think about adding mechanisms to detect external build dependencies.
    • potentially have OS and/or RPMs install external package descriptions
  5. RPM status (Peter Scheibel) * Peter mostly working on coding up support for DESTDIR in many different packages.
    • Trying out auto-destdir; not as painless as he'd like it
    • Looks like packages that do not support DESTDIR are always going to require a bit of extra work to get them staged properly.
    • Peter is working on a document to describe how we'll project from spack hash space to RPM namespace

Discussion Items

  1. Spack usage across DOE labs (NERSC, ALCF, OLCF, Fermi, others?)

  2. Joaquin & Richard Gerber curious how Spack/packaging tools are used at other sites

  3. ORNL, Robert French:

    • ORNL currently has infrastructure based on Smithy, looking to move to Spack
    • Waiting on Cray modules & support from Mario and Greg (but have a lot of faith :)

  4. Fermilab, Jim Amundson:

    • Fermilab running large server farms for physics experiments, slightly different model from DOE
    • Different people factor systems different ways
      • Multiple build tools
      • Most tied to "UPS", kind of like environment modules.
        • Use UPS to figure out what to build
        • CMake, other macros are intimately tied to UPS
    • Robert: Similar to ORNL in that people rely on env modules to find deps.

  5. ANL, William Scullin:

    • ANL has 3 internal compute centers, many systems for deploying libraries.
  • LCRC using Spack in production
  • Internal advocacy at ALCF
  • Last year: joint cluster challenge project with William Scullin and IIT students
  1. Joaquin: how does Spack funding work?
  • LLNL: ~2 FTE total, ProTools team dedicated to long-term support.
    • Todd: lead developer/PI
    • Matt, others in dev environment group contribute
    • Greg Becker: .5 FTE
    • Peter Scheibel: .5 FTE
    • Ben & DJ at Kitware: .5 FTE
  • ORNL: .5 FTE total to spend on Spack
  • NERSC: 1 FTE currently (Mario), spinning up another to work part-time (Brandon)
  • ANL: Adam Stewart at LCRC has many contributions.
  • EPFL: .5 FTE (Massimiliano Culpo) committed to using Spack in production on EPFL systems
    • Luigi Calori at CINECA also investigating.
  • Other contributors:
    • Erik Schnetter at Permieter Institute contributing a lot of Mac support
    • Elizabeth Fischer, NASA Goddard recently joined
  1. Joaquin: long-term it would be really good to have some kind of co-funding structure

  • what should the license be?

  • as long as support stays in place NERSC is happy to be on board

  • Matt: LLNL has some ASC funding (ATDM) for the Production Tools (ProTools) team

    • Matt leads this team.
    • Team is intended to support LLNL code teams long-term
    • Team is also scoped to support community, with hope of getting external participation & contributions
      • Long-term software lifecycle.

  1. Joaquin: what about hackathons, training?

    • NERSC has BES hackathons that have worked well
    • Robert: ORNL has hackathons for OpenACC, etc.
      • model has worked well
      • internal training & hackathons are planned
    • DOE-wide hackathons also interesting idea.

  2. Jim Amundson: As an end-user, having a Spack formula that could work across ALCF, OLCF, and NERSC would be huge

    • Reducing porting effort could save ~1 FTE/year
    • Greg Becker: Many packages in Spack have required modifications to work on cray
      • e.g.: linker option defaults, etc.
    • If you want to port to Cray you may need a lot of conditionals right now
      • Long-term we'd like to make packages relatively portable

  3. Todd:

  • We are looking into broader DOE funding, not clear how much we can get that way but we will try.
  • Even if that does not come through, it sounds like we could do this organically and have regular meetings somewhere to work on co-developing packages and features.
    • Spackathons?
    • Facilities are already putting skin in the game, so community building (not necessarily co-funding) is needed.
  • number of people on the call (18) is an indicator that we can keep this going.
  • Todd will work on getting meetings/hackathons started.
    • Fermi and ANL have limited travel budget so maybe Chicago area?

General discussion

  • ORNL will continue to have smaller cray on-site
  • Robert: do you know the site http://whyisgitbetterthanx.com?
    • would be nice to have one of these for spack & other build systems.
    • Need to justify switch to Spack to ORNL.
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